What's Going to Happen to Obamacare?

Republicans have been elected on a single promise over the past few elections -- repeal Obamacare.

Most people have heard the name, but don't know what it means. If you ask them about the benefits of individual provisions of the law, they are in favor of it. If you call it Obamacare -- they hate it.

The problem all along has been that there is no  Republican alternative -- that's because the private insurance based ACA WAS the Republican alternative to expansion of medicare and medicaid.

And just repealing the law would leave 22 million people without insurance -- not surprising then that Trump has softened his stance since the election. 

Five Thirty Eight untangles the thread of what "repealing Obamacare" might actually mean:

The law is built on interlocking provisions; removing one puts pressure on others. That’s what happened when the Supreme Court made the Medicaid expansion optional for states, leaving 2.5 million people in states that chose not to expand in what has been called the Medicaid gap: too poor to be eligible for the marketplace subsidies but ineligible for Medicaid. Leaving in place the mandate for insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions, as Trump said he’s considering, while getting rid of either the individual mandate — the requirement that people get insured — or the subsidies that motivate low-income healthy people to join the insurance rolls could also create instability in the insurance market. Without the necessary mix of healthy people in a plan to offset the costs of insuring people with pre-existing conditions, premiums rise, becoming unaffordable for everyone.

So far there is no prescription of replacing Obamacare that won't result in increasing costs and decreasing coverage. That's the problem with governing -- people feel the effect of what you do and you actually have to follow through with your promises.

Forbes details a lot of things that are going to be bad for health and healthcare on the Republican agenda. If you want a dozen more things to be scared of it is worth reading --  The anti-science crackpots he has in line have all kinds of bad news.

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Required Reading:
What the Republicans are going to do to your health.
What Will Trump Do to Obamacare  538
What will Happen to Obama Care